Standard Bank Group

In its strategic mission to apply an enterprise architecture (EA) approach to influence business and technology decisions, Standard Bank Group (SBG) has achieved significant results since 2019. Notably, its use of BIAN to advance the API journey earned SBG the BIAN Transformation Champion Award in 2023. However, the business has recognized that there is further to go in terms of aligning business and technology stakeholders under an EA vision.

To address the risk of mis-scoping technology decisions due to friction in interactions with non-technical stakeholders, SBG decided to pilot applying the BIAN framework to corporate functions including finance, people and culture (P&C), risk, compliance, and marketing.

Building on existing BIAN-driven best practice within the business, SBG developed a Service Domain Map for each function, conducting workshops with business and technology stakeholders to ensure alignment.

The discovery exercise for P&C revealed that its existing HR system, affecting over 50,000 employees, was deeply embedded in the employee value chain – an insight which directly led to a process for integrating and de-risking technologies underpinning the employee engagement experience.

Applying BIAN effectively brought consistency and granularity to the conversation across technology and business decision making. Following this pilot, there is a significant improvement in alignment between business and technology stakeholders in corporate functions, , and the usage of BIAN will be further pursued with divisions across the business.